This blog provides advice to writers on their literary work.
See end of this post for links on these topics:
How can you get the full benefit of workshops? How can you work best with your mentor? What, when, and how should you publish?

Saturday, April 29, 2017

Is There Still Such a Thing as a "Draft" of a Piece of Writing?

I would call a “draft” of a literary work any version that
is finished in a preliminary way. Usually, writers create multiple drafts of a
work before they consider it finished.

But do “drafts” still exist in the digital age, when new versions are rarely
printed out? For longer works, certainly. For a work such as a novel or a book
of nonfiction, a draft can take years to create or revise. A novelist or
nonfiction writer may spend a year or two writing the first draft, ask for
comments from writer friends, work on a second draft for a year more, send the
text to an agent, and spend months working on a third draft that incorporates
the agent’s comments. That is a fairly typical writing process for full-length
prose works.

But for shorter works, such as poems, short stories, or
blogs, drafts have almost ceased to exist in the digital age. The
concept of a draft dates back to the pre-digital era, when you had to write or
type everything by hand, and every draft existed on a separate sheet or sheets
of paper. But even in those bad old days, each draft had notes that were
scrawled in the margins or between lines, Inserts A and B added on extra pages,
etc. So one “draft” was in reality many drafts.

For shorter works, such as a poem or a blog, every time you
open a file, make a change, and hit Save, you’ve created a new draft. There is
rarely such a thing as a draft anymore in the old sense of a newly printed or
handwritten copy. Or rather, every version, even a digitally printed version,
is actually a draft, since it so easy to change text even once it has been
published, if it’s online.

What does this mean for writers of short works, that there
are no longer drafts, or that works are perpetually in progress? On the one
hand, it gives a writer a sense of freedom that s/he can make changes so
easily. It’s as if a sculptor could work in magical clay that’s perpetually wet
and never dries until you want it to. There’s much greater fluidity and
flexibility now for writers, and that situation is highly conducive to
creativity, which usually requires experimentation.

On the other hand, with text being so fluid, there is little
incentive to polish writing to perfection. Rarely is a version considered
final. There’s also not the same sense of progressive steps in the writing process. There is no longer
physical evidence of the various stages that a work has undergone, the way
there used to be a paper trail of all the drafts of a poem, for example.

Is it a good thing that writers now work in a much more
fluid medium, where it’s easier to make changes, but more difficult to see a
work as final, as finished? I’m not sure it’s better, but it certainly is a
different process for writers of short works. In a way those changes mirror
what has happened in the realm of relationships—there is much more fluidity now
in relationships than there has been in recent centuries, but there is less of a sense of
each stage of courtship, with the progression of steps leading to a final resolution.